What's with Ray Kurzweil?

You may have seen the recent television commercial from Best Buy that features inventors of some modern technologies featured in smartphones (scroll down to view it if you haven't).

One of the innovators presented is voice and speech recognition guru Ray Kurzweil, shown in what is presumably his library or office. Now it strikes me odd that the documents on the extensive bookcases in view are placed horizontally rather than the usual practice of storing books and reports vertically on the shelves. It seems that retrieving an item at the bottom of each stack would be a bit difficult and could result in damage to it. Also the arrangement may not make best use of the available shelf volume.

Now a Google search could not come up with any reason for his doing this. So I'm asking you to leave a comment on why do you think he does this? And could it be connected to the "singularity," or "rapture," or a convergence, or whatever?

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That really bugs you OCD types, right Rick? Kurzweil obviously is more focused on other things.
Besides, as noted, the space above dissimilar book heights is volumetrically inefficient. Horizontal book orientation also allows them to be placed on top of a papers stack.
The other aspect is the problem of how to stack scientific papers on end?

The notion that the man concerned about prolonging his current physical existence long enough to be somehow reincarnated and immortalized in a bunch of bloody code would care about the preservation of books...
The shelf space argument could have a grain of truth, although I use the space above a conventional vertical row for more books as it is (I'm am always running out of space).

Placing bound books on the edge is hard on the binding; the weight of the printed material tries to lever itself away from the binding. placing the book either on the flat or with the bound edge down alleviates the problem.
Paperbacks and other books which don't have a cover larger than the printed material don't suffer this issue.

I have no idea, but this is so fascinating that I'm going to start stalking his garbage can. Whatever would I learn from that? The music of the spheres? Gather a big tub of phlogiston?
It's early for the silly season, isn't it?

That is an interesting thought. The shelf set pretty clearly looks to be designed that way intentionally rather than adapted.
I would guess that it's done to protect the books. I would also guess that, along with stress on the binding, he's also carefully considered the tradeoffs between accessibility, compressibility and space design efficiency.

More efficient use of space. The space between the top of a book and the shelf above it is usually wasted if you stack books vertically. Especially if books are not of constant height and the shelf has to be adjusted to accomodate the tallest one. Anyway, he's probably read them and isn't going to read them again, but like most of us, can't throw books away.

yes it is easier to densely pack and insert or remove books standing on edge.
Unfortunarely, from a book binders perspective it is not the best method to maintain the binding over long periods of time...flat is:)